"The Prime Minister said that we hoped to shatter twenty German cities as we
had shattered Cologne, Lubeck, Dusseldorf, and so on. More and more aeroplanes
and bigger and bigger bombs. M. Stalin had heard of 2-ton bombs. We had now
begun to use 4-ton bombs, and this would be continued throughout the winter. If need be, as the war went on, we hoped to shatter almost every dwelling in
almost every German city. " (Official transcript of the meeting
at the Kremlin between Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin on Wednesday, August 12, 1942, at 7
P.M.)

"The destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the
disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany [is the goal]. ... It
should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities,
transport and lives; the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented
scale; and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear
of extended and intensified bombing are accepted and intended aims of our
bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories."
-- "Air Marshal Arthur Harris, Commander in Chief, Bomber Commander,
British Royal Air Force, October 25, 1943 quoted in Tami Biddle,
Rhetoric
and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about
Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2002), p.
220.

Is the deliberate mass murder of civilians on a huge scale
ever justified? This article does not have an answer for this question.
However, it is important to note that this was a very specific goal of England
and America in World War II as the quotes above show. Germany and
Japan also bombed civilians but the scale of what they did was a tiny fraction
of their opponents. More people died in the bombing of Hamburg alone that
in the entire German bombing campaign against England. Was the
Anglo-American bombing necessary or moral? Many serious military experts
feel it was a poor choice in terms of military priorities. What
follows is documentation from both sides.

Born in Italy in 1869, Lieutenant Colonel Giulio Douhet was among one of the
most influential military theorists of his age. As a result of his
experiences in the First World War, Douhet became convinced that strategically
applied air power would be the key to winning wars in the future. Like his
fellow veterans of the Great War, Douhet understood that well armed ground
troops occupying defensive positions held an infinitely superior advantage over
attacking troops. However, air power, when applied on the battlefield,
could be used to break the deadlock of trench warfare.

While the tactical conclusions Douhet drew from the experience of bloody
trench warfare were not particularly unique, his strategic vision concerning the
use of aerial bombardment proved to be a much more lasting, deadly, and,
ultimately, morally ambiguous contribution. In his landmark book The
Command of the Air (1921), Douhet pioneered the idea of using area bombing as an offensive weapon against civilian populations. The emphasis
on destroying civilian centers behind the lines put Douhet firmly within the
camp of new "total war" theorists. These theorists argued that the
industrial production of a belligerent nation, as well as the will to fight of
its population, constituted essential elements of that nation's capacity to wage
war. There was, in essence, no difference between the military importance
of the battlefront and rear-support areas. As Douhet himself wrote,

"Modern armies represent the armoured shield behind which the nations at war
work to prepare the means appropriate to feed the war; the powerful aeroplane
is able to pass over such armour and strike at the nation itself in its centres
of production and along the lines of supply running from the country to the
army. Thus it is the best weapon to strike a fatal blow . . . the new weapon
attacks not only the fist but the heart, and cuts the nerves and veins of the
arm."[1]

Within this context therefore it was perfectly legitimate to use whatever
means necessary in order to break the enemy's will to fight. To again
quote Douhet,

"A complete breakdown of the social structure cannot but take place in a
country subjected to this kind of merciless pounding from the air. The time will
soon come when, to put an end to the horror and suffering, the people
themselves, driven by the instinct of self-preservation, would rise up and
demand an end to the war--this before their Army and Navy had time to mobilize."[2]

The kind of aerial bombardment Douhet suggested was remarkably brutal, not
only in its application but also in the kinds of bombs that should be dropped on
civilians. Douhet called for a combination of bombs to be dropped in
waves, starting with high explosives. These were to be followed by
incendiary bombs to burn structures (even ruins) to the ground and then gas
bombs to kill those who had survived the explosives and following conflagration.
Once the will to fight had been broken by these continuous waves of aerial
bombardment, the combatant would achieve what Douhet called a "morale victory",
meaning the disheartened enemy population would force their government to sue
for peace. The irony is that in proposing the massive bombardment of
civilians, Douhet was actually attempting to limit the overall casualties of
war. He firmly believed that the loss of morale of enemy civilians
subjected to relentless air attacks would shorten conflicts and therefore save
lives.

Many of the basic tenets of Douhet's philosophy on the offensive use of air
power came to be adopted by the Allied air forces during the Second World War.
Certain elements of Douhet's think were also adopted by the Fascist powers,
which also regularly used air power to target civilian centers like London,
Warsaw, Manila, Shanghai, Addis Ababa, and many, many other places. It was
the Western Allies, though, and the British in particular, who would adopt the
concept of using massive bomber formations offensively to deliberately target
German civilians and cities. The immediate effect of this doctrine would
be to cause an appalling loss of life.

The concept of "area bombing" was loosely based on
the original theories of Giulio Douhet. According to Douhet,
target cities would be subjected to successive waves of bombers carrying
different kinds of bombs. The first wave was to carry high explosives for
destroying structures, infrastructure, roads and rail lines. This would be
followed by a wave of bombers dropping incendiary bombs. Incendiaries were
intended to burn out remaining usable structures and to destroy any semblance of
shelter for the civilian population. Finally, Douhet called for a third
wave of bombers to drop gas on cities in order to kill as many people as
possible. The combined effect of such bombing, Douhet reasoned, would so
terrorize the enemy that either a) their morale would be broken and they would
surrender or b) the civilian population would rise up and demand their
government cease hostilities. Douhet never denied that his bombing
doctrine would result in a tremendous loss of life. War meant killing,
after all.

The Allied Practice

In practice, the Allies carried pursued two types of bombing
campaigns against Germany. These were precision bombing and area bombing.

Precision or
Pinpoint Bombing: Never as precise as claimed, the primary objective was
to destroy a specific military or industrial target using aerial
bombardment. Civilians were often killed in these kinds of operations.
However, their deaths were considered an unfortunate result of the inaccuracy of
precision bombing, the intent was not to target and kill civilians wholesale.
By and large, the British pursued this kind of bombing in 1940 and 1941.
It was abandoned by the RAF in favor of city-killing, area bombing in February 1942.
The US followed suit in December 1943, after the disastrous second Schweinfurt raid,
but continued to pursue both area and precision bombing until the end of the war
in Europe. In operations over Japan, the USAAF overwhelmingly conducted
area bombing.

Area Bombing (also called Strategic Bombing):
In contrast to precision bombing, area bombing targeted entire cities,
consisting of many square miles, and not specific military or industrial
targets. During area bombing runs wave after
wave of bombers, including as many as 1,000 airplanes, would sweep over a wide
expanse and drop hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tons of bombs on the target
city.

The concept of area bombing held that cities, as
vital centers of economic production, were in themselves legitimate targets.
Following this reasoning, it ran that if an entire urban area was destroyed it
would dislocate the industrial labor force, thereby making it more difficult for
the enemy to produce the war materiel necessary to keep up the fight.
Similarly, the logic of area bombing also ran that the enemy's industrial
workforce was in itself a legitimate target. Kill enough of the enemy's
laborers and industry would grind to a halt. In connection with this
there was the question of shattering the morale of the belligerent population.
Killing as many civilians as possible and rendering as many homeless as possible
was thought to have a dramatically negative effect on the morale of the civilian
population. Once morale had been undermined it was assumed (hoped) that
the enemy would capitulate (see Douhet's Concept above).

Area bombing could consist of dropping purely
high-explosive bomb loads. More often, however, it entailed using a bombing method called "firebombing"
in which high-explosives and incendiary bombs were dropped during the same air
raid. Firebombing was employed simply to achieve the maximum amount of
destruction possible. The objective was to send as many bombers as
possible over the target in as rapid a succession as possible in order to create
a self-fueling firestorm. First dropped would be the high-explosives, in
order to blow apart buildings, destroy water mains, and wreck roads. Incendiary bombs
filled with phosphorus (later napalm) would then be dropped in order to cause
huge fires. A third wave of bombers would drop fragmentation or time-delay bombs in
order to kill firefighters arriving on the scene and thus keep the fires burning. This firestorm
would grow so hot that it would create its own wind tunnel effect and burn
absolutely everything, including steel. Firestorms caused by bombing could
burn for days, until all of its fuel had been exhausted.

The British perfected firebombing and employed it
against many German cities, particularly older ones which had crowded streets
and mostly wooden structures. The destruction of Hamburg
and Dresden, are the best
known examples of cities destroyed by bombing created firestorms, while in Japan
Tokyo and other cities
were incinerated by firestorms caused by the USAAF.

The following one-page memorandum written by Lord Cherwell (Professor
Lindemann at the time) on March 30, 1942 was critical in reinforcing Winston
Churchill's resolve to employ area bombing against German cities.

The following seems a simple method of
estimating what we could do by bombing Germany. Careful analysis of the
effects of raids on Birmingham, Hull and elsewhere have shown that, on the
average, one ton of bombs dropped on a built-up area demolishes 20-40 dwellings
and turns 100-200 people out of house and home.

We know from our experience that we can count on
nearly 14 operational sorties per bomber produced. The average lift of the
bombers we are going to produce over the next fifteen months will be about three
tons. It follows that each of these bombers will in its lifetime drop
about forty tons of bombs. If these are dropped on built-up areas they
will make 4,000-8,000 people homeless.

In 1938 over 22 million Germans lived in
fifty-eight towns of over 100,000 inhabitants, which, with modern equipment,
should be easy to find and hit. Our forecast output of heavy bombers
(including Wellingtons) between now and the middle of 1943 is about 10,000.
If even half the total load of 10,000 bombers were dropped on the built-up
areas of these fifty-eight German towns, the great majority of their inhabitants
(about one-third of the German population) would be turned out of house and
home.

Investigation seems to show that having one's
house demolished is most damaging to morale. People seem to mind it more
than having their friends or even relatives killed. At Hull, signs of
strain were evident, though only one-tenth of the houses were demolished.
On the above figures we should be able to do ten times as much harm to each of
the fifty-eight principal German towns. There seems little doubt that this
would break the spirit of the people.

Our calculation assumes, of course, that we
really get one-half of our bombs into built-up areas. On the other hand,
no account is taken of the large promised American production (6,000 heavy
bombers in the period in question). Nor has regard been paid to the
inevitable damage to factories, communications, etc., in these towns and the
damage by fire, probably accentuated by breakdown of public services."

"The Prime Minister said that we hoped to shatter twenty German cities as we
had shattered Cologne, Lubeck, Dusseldorf, and so on. More and more aeroplanes
and bigger and bigger bombs. M. Stalin had heard of 2-ton bombs. We had now
begun to use 4-ton bombs, and this would be continued throughout the winter. If need be, as the war went on, we hoped to shatter almost every dwelling in
almost every German city. " (Official transcript of the meeting
at the Kremlin between Churchill and Stalin on Wednesday, August 12, 1942, at 7
P.M.)

"The destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the
disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany [is the goal]. ... It
should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities,
transport and lives; the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented
scale; and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear
of extended and intensified bombing are accepted and intended aims of our
bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories."
-- "Air Marshal Arthur Harris to Sir Arthur Street, Under Secretary of State,
Air Ministry, October 25, 1943" quoted in Tami Biddle,
Rhetoric
and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about
Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2002), p.
220.

"Perhaps Hitler's
famous intuition gave him an inkling of the ultimate significance of what
Britain was beginning to do in 1935-36. In May of the former year he expressed,
his personal apprehension on the subject of long-range bombing to Mr. Edward
Price Bell, the well-known press correspondent. 'War has been speeded up too
much,' he said, 'and made too overwhelmingly destructive for our geographical
limitations. Within an hour—in some instances within forty minutes of the
outbreak of hostilities—swift bombing machines would wreak ruin upon European
capitals.' There was nothing profound in that remark, but it was significant
when made by a man in whose brain there was already being formed a scheme for
the domination of Europe. He was afraid of the air. He showed that he
was, again, when in 1935 and in 1936 he put forward proposals for the
prohibition of bombing outside battle-zones. Again, there was nothing new in the
idea of such prohibition. It was simply another instance of the survival of the
military code of thought. It reflected the view, put forward in Germany in the
last war, that the proper rôle of the air arm is that of long-range artillery."
-- J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London, 1944), pp. 38-39.

"I am personally
convinced that the proposal, was seriously meant, that is, that it was intended
to be accepted. I can not subscribe to the view that Hitler brought it forward
in 1935 and 1936 with his tongue in his cheek; not in the least because he was
incapable of doing so,but simply because it was unquestionably in his
interest to have such a restriction accepted. He was scared of the possible
effect of a bombing offensive upon Germany's war effort andthe morale of
the German population. He would infinitely have preferred to fight out the war
in another way, a way that was not our way but was his way. He did
not want our kind of war. That is why it is right and proper that he
should get our kind of war from now to the end." -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing
Vindicated (London, 1944), p. 41.

"... When I look around to see how we can win the war I see that there is
only one sure path. We have no Continental Army which can defeat the
German military power. The blockade is broken and Hitler has Asia and
probably Africa to draw from. Should he be repulsed here or not try
invasion, he will recoil eastward, and we have nothing to stop him. But
there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an
absolutely devastating exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this
country upon the Nazi homeland. We must be able to overwhelm him by this
means, without which I do not see a way through." -- Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, July 8, 1940, quoted in Max
Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 116.

Note:
Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the man responsible for implementing the RAF's
area bombing policy, and also the man who has been criticized most for it,
stated of this Churchill quote: "It was the origin of the idea of bombing the
enemy out of the war. I should have been proud of it, but it originated
with Winston." -- Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. VI: Finest
Hour, 1939-1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1983), p. 656.

"I am deeply concerned with the
non-expansion, and indeed contraction of our bomber force which must be expected
between now and April and May next, according to present policy. Surely an
effort should be made to increase our bomb-dropping capacity during this period.
... It is not possible to organize a second-line bomber force
which, especially in the dark of the moon, would discharge bombs from a
considerable and safe height upon the nearest large built-up area of Germany,
which contains military targets in abundance?
The Ruhr, of course, is obviously indicated. ... I ask that a
whole-hearted effort shall be made to cart a large number of bombs into Germany
by a second-line organization such as I have suggested, and under conditions in
which admittedly no special accuracy could be obtained."
-- Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Air Minister Sir Archibald Sinclair,
October 20, 1940, quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press,
1979), p. 106.

"We all hope that the air offensive against
Germany will realize the expectations of the Air Staff. Everything is
being done to create the bombing force on the largest possible scale, and there
is no intention of changing this policy. ... It is the most potent method of
impairing the enemy's morale we can use at the present time. ... Even if all the towns of Germany were rendered largely uninhabitable, it
does not follow that the military control would be weakened, or even that war
industry could not be carried on. ... The Air Staff would make a mistake to put
their claim too high. ... It may well be that German morale will crack, and that
our bombing will play a very important part in bringing the result about. ...
The only plan is to persevere." --
Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Air Staff Chief Sir Charles Portal, October
7, 1941, quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979),
p. 121.

"... I am all for the
bombing of working class areas of German cities. I am Cromwellian - I
believe in 'slaying in the name of the Lord', because I do not believe you will
ever bring home to the civil population of Germany the horrors of war until they
have been tested in this war." -- Mr
Geoffrey Shakespeare, Liberal Member of Parliament for Norwich, May 1942, quoted
in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 125.

"His Majesty's Government
will treat any use of this weapon of poison gas against Russia exactly as if it
was directed against ourselves. ... and we shall not hesitate to use these over
all suitable objectives in Western Germany from the moment that your armies and
people are assaulted in this way." --
Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Josef Stalin, March 18, 1942, quoted in
Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. VII: Road to Victory:
1941-1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1986), p. 76.

"We are bombing
Germany, city by city, and ever more terribly, in order to make it impossible
for you to go on with the war. That is our object. We shall pursue
it remorselessly. City by city; Lubeck, Rostock, Cologne, Emden, Bremen,
Wilhelmshaven, Duisburg, Hamburg - and the list will grow longer and longer.
Let the Nazis drag you down to disaster with them if you will. That is for
you to decide. We are coming by day and by night. No part of the
Reich is safe. People who work in [factories] live close to them.
Therefore we hit your houses, and you." -- Pamphlet dropped in Germany by the
RAF, Summer 1942, quoted in A.C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities:
The History and Moral Legacy of the WW II Bombing of Civilians in Germany and
Japan (Walker & Company, 2006), p. 50.

"In the days when we were fighting alone we
answered the question 'How are you going to win the war?' by stating 'We will
shatter Germany by bombing.' Since then the enormous injuries inflicted on
the German army by the Russians, and the accession of the manpower and munitions
of the United States, have rendered other possibilities open. ... We look
forward to the mass invasion of the Continent by liberating armies, and the
general revolt of the populations against the Hitler tyranny. All
the same it would be a mistake to cast aside our original
thought - which, it may be mentioned, is also strong in American minds, namely,
that the severe, ruthless bombing of Germany on an ever-increasing scale will
not only cripple her war effort, including U-boat and aircraft production, but
will also create conditions intolerable to the mass of German population. ... We
must regard the bomber offensive against Germany at least as a feature in
breaking her war-will second only to the largest military operations which can
be conducted on the Continent until that war-will is broken."
-- Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Air Minister Sir Archibald Sinclair, late
1942, quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p.
117.

"Every blow delivered by your air force to
the vital German centres evoke[s] a most lively echo in the hearts of many
millions throughout the width and breadth of our country" -- Josef Stalin to
Winston Churchill, April 7, 1943, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S.
Churchill, Vol. VII: Road to Victory: 1941-1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Co., 1986), p. 379.

"Tonight at Chequers in the course of a film
showing the bombing of German towns from the air very well and dramatically
done, WSC (i.e. Churchill) suddenly sat bolt upright and said to me, 'Are we
beasts? Are we taking this too far?'" -- Excerpt from the diary of Lord
Richard Casey, June 27, 1943, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill,
Vol. VII: Road to Victory: 1941-1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1986), p.
437.

"The destruction of German cities, the killing
of German workers, and the disruption of civilised community life throughout
Germany [is the goal]. ... It should be emphasised that the destruction of
houses, public utilities, transport and lives; the creation of a refugee
problem on an unprecedented scale; and the breakdown of morale both at home
and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing are
accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not
by-products of attempts to hit factories." -- "Air Marshal Arthur Harris to Sir Arthur Street, Under Secretary of State,
Air Ministry, October 25, 1943" quoted in Tami Biddle, Rhetoric
and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about
Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2002), p.
220.

"I do not myself believe that the
Germans will use gas on the beaches [of Normandy], although this is the most
potent way in which gas could be used. The reason is that we could
retaliate tenfold or more through the greater power of our air forces to deliver
upon their cities. ... It is however worth while considering whether a warning
should not be uttered by me and the President such as those we have previously
given about the Russians repeating our assurance that we have no intention of
using gas but also giving warning that if any form of gas or
toxic substances is used upon us or any of our Allies, we shall immediately use
the full delivery power of our Strategic Air Forces to drench the German cities
and towns where any war industry exists."
-- Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Major General Hastings Ismay, May 21,
1944, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. VII: Road to
Victory: 1941-1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1986), p. 777.

"It was for consideration
whether we should not publish a list of, say, 100 of the smaller towns in
Germany, where defences were likely to be weak, and announce our intention of
destroying them one by one by bombing attack. It would, of course, be
necessary to take account of the extent to which a policy of this kind would
divert our air power from the support of our Allies in France and from targets,
such as oil installations, factories, depots, flying bomb sites, attacks on
which directly crippled the enemy's general war effort or his power to launch
flying bomb attacks." -- Prime
Minister Winston Churchill, War Cabinet meeting suggestion, July 3, 1944, quoted
in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. VII: Road to Victory:
1941-1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1986), p. 839.

"It is surely obvious that children, invalids and old people who are
economically unproductive but must nevertheless consume food and other
necessaries are a handicap to the German war effort and it would therefore be
sheer waste of effort to attack them. This however does not imply … that
no German civilians are proper objects for bombing. The German
economic system, which I am instructed by my objective to destroy, includes
workers, houses, and public utilities, and it is therefore meaningless to claim
that the wiping out of German cities is 'not an end in itself but the inevitable
accompaniment of an all out attack on the enemy's means and capacity to wage war'."
-- Air Marshal Arthur Harris quoted in Tami Biddle, Rhetoric
and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about
Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2002), p.
220.

"The destruction of
factories, which was nevertheless on an enormous scale, could be regarded as a
bonus. The aiming-points were usually right in the center of the town."
-- Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive (London: HarperCollins, 1947), p. 147.

"I could ... see only one
possible way of bringing pressure to bear on the Boche, and certainly only one
way of defeating him; that was by air bombardment. It consequently looked
as if it was going to be a straight fight between our own and the enemy's
production of heavy bombers. ... If we could keep ahead of the Germans, I was
convinced, having watched the bombing of London, that a bomber offensive of
adequate weight and the right kind of bombs would, if continued for long enough,
be something that no country in the world could endure."
-- Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive (London: HarperCollins, 1947), p. 15.

"While area bombing, if it could have been
continued long enough and in sufficient weight, might in the end have forced the
enemy to capitulate, his counter-measures would have prevented us from
maintaining such a policy to the decisive point." -- Sir Arthur Harris to Air
Staff Chief Sir Charles Portal, January 8, 1945 quoted in Max Hastings,
Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 332.

"We should never allow ourselves to apologize for what we did to Germany." --
Winston Churchill to John Lawrence, quoted in
Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 107.

"Winston is pinning all his faith to the
bombing offensive now. The devastation it causes suits his temperament,
and he would be disappointed at a less destructive ending to the war." --
General Sir Frederick Pile to Basil Liddell Hart, quoted in
Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 176.

"... In the past eighteen
months, Bomber Command has virtually destroyed forty-five out of the leading
sixty German cities. In spite of invasion diversions (i.e. D-Day) we have
so far managed to keep up and even to exceed our average of two and a half
cities devastated a month. ... There are not many industrial centres of
population now left intact. Are we going to abandon this vast task, which
the Germans themselves have long admitted to be their worst headache, just as it
nears completion?" -- Sir Arthur
Harris to Air Staff Chief Sir Charles Portal, November 1, 1944 quoted in Max
Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 331.

"You refer to a plan for
the destruction of the sixty leading German cities, and to your efforts to keep
up with, and even to exceed, your average of two and a half such cities
devastated each month; I know that you
have long felt such a plan to be the most effective way of bringing about the
collapse of Germany. Knowing this, I have, I must confess, at times
wondered whether the magnetism of the remaining German cities has not in the
past tended as much to deflect our bombers from their primary objectives as the
tactical and weather difficulties which you described so fully in your letter of
1 November. I would like you to reassure me that this is not so. If
I knew you to be as wholehearted in the attack on oil as in the past you have
been in the matter of attacking cities, I would have little to worry about." --
Air Staff Chief Sir Charles Portal to Sir Arthur Harris, November 12, 1944,
quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 331.

"We made up the damage-assessment techniques as we went along, because there
was no precedent for what we were doing" -- The Target Intelligence Department
of RAF Bomber Command, quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p.
252.

"Prime Minister, Victory, speedy and
complete, awaits the side which first employs air power as it should be
employed. ... We are free, if we will, to employ our rapidly
increasing air strength in the proper manner. In such a manner as would
avail to knock Germany out of the war in a matter of months, if we decide upon
the right course. ... It is
imperative, if we hope to win the war, to abandon the disastrous policy of
military intervention in the land campaigns of Europe, and to concentrate our
air power against the enemy's weakest spots. ... It is the only course offering
a quick victory; it is the only course which can bring any ponderable aid to
Russia in time." -- Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris to Winston Churchill, June 17,
1942, quoted in Dudley Saward, Bomber Harris: The Story of Sir Arthur Harris
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1985), pp. 160-162.

"The one way in which
Germany can be defeated is by air attack.
... [Our efforts] prove beyond the possibility of doubt that it
would be possible in the next few months to raze substantially to the ground 30
to 40 of the principal German cities, and it is suggested that the effect upon
German morale and German production of doing so would be fatal to them,
and decisive as encouragement and direct assistance to Russia." -- Air Marshal
Sir Arthur Harris to Winston Churchill, September 3, 1942, quoted in Dudley
Saward, Bomber Harris: The Story of Sir Arthur Harris (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1985), pp. 169-170.

"It is my firm belief that we are on the verge of a final showdown in the
bombing war, and that the next few months will be vital. ... I am certain
that given average weather and concentration on the main job, we can push
Germany over by bombing this year." -- Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris to Air
Staff Chief Sir Charles Portal, August 12, 1943, quoted in
Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 257.

"It will be seen that the enemy has irretrievably lost 1,000,000 man years.
This represents no less than 36 per cent of the industrial effort that would
have been put out by these towns if they had remained unmolested. ... Expressing
these losses in another way, 2,400,000,000 man-hours have been lost for an
expenditure of 116,500 tons of bombs claimed dropped, and this amounts to an
average return for every ton of bombs dropped of 20,500 lost man-hours, or
rather more than one quarter of the time spent in building a Lancaster. ... This
being so, a Lancaster has only to go to a German city once to wipe off its own
capital cost, and the results of all subsequent sorties will be clear profit."
-- Air Staff Intelligence Report, February 19, 1944, quoted in
Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 253.

"We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF will come in on it.
It will cost between 400-500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war."
-- Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, November
3, 1943, quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p.
257.

"We are convinced that Bomber Command's attacks are doing more towards
shortening the war than any other offensive including the Russians'.
The C-in-C's (i.e. Harris) letter is the letter of a man with ONE AIM, the
rightness of which is his obsession. ... Our plan first to break the German air
force defence and then to get on with the war does not appeal to a man who knows
that it can be won by immediate offensive action long before our defensive plan
has come near to completion. This is why the importance of industries in
the Balkans and southern Germany does not appeal to him. Although
he speaks of nine-tenths of German industry being nearer Norfolk than Lombardy,
we are sure he really means that nine-tenths of the German population is nearer
Norfolk, and in the light of our new morale paper which is about to be
published, it is the population which is the joint in the German armour.
The C-in-C's spear is in it, but it needs a jolt to drive it home to the heart.
Apparently, only the Americans can provide this additional thrust, and we
believe he is right to ask for it." -- Air Vice-Marshal F.F. Inglis to Air
Staff Chief Sir Charles Portal, November 5, 1943, quoted in
Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 258.

"The British are greatly overestimating the
damage done to Berlin. Naturally it is terrible, but there is no question
of 25 per cent of the capital no longer existing. The English naturally
want to furnish their public with a propaganda morsel. I have every reason
to want them to believe this and therefore forbid any denial. The sooner
London is convinced that there is nothing left of Berlin, the sooner they will
stop their air offensive against the Reich capital." -- Joseph Goebbels, The
Goebbels Diaries (Secker and Warburg, 1978), p. 438.

"It is naturally impossible
to state with arithmetical precision the acreage of German built-up area which
must be destroyed to produce capitulation. However, ... it is surely
impossible to believe that an increase by more than half of existing devastation
within four months could be sustained by Germany without total collapse."
-- Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris to the Air Ministry, December 28,
1943, quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p.
265.

Concerning Arthur Harris' unwillingness to subordinate the destruction of the
German air force, the explicit Allied objective of
Operation Pointblank, to his area bombing campaign in 1943-44.

"I would say at the outset that I agree with
you that there have been diversions from priority objectives as
laid down by the Chiefs of Staff.
I had already become apprehensive about this dispersal of our effort. Last
week I had a useful meeting with [General Ira] Eaker and Harris and stressed to
them the urgency of concentrating the maximum effort on the defeat of the German
air force." -- Air Staff Chief Sir Charles Portal to General Hap Arnold, October
1943, quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p.
259.

"It is confirmed and emphasized that the closest co-ordination is essential
to the successful prosecution of the
Combined Bomber
Offensive and that without it, the reduction of German fighter strength
which is a prerequisite to the launching of Overlord
as well as to the effective conduct of Pointblank may not be achieved in
the time available. I am accordingly to request that you adhere to the
spirit of the directive forwarded in the Air Ministry letter dated 10 June 1943,
and that you attack, as far as practicable, those industrial centres associated
with the German fighter air-frame and ball-bearing industry." -- Air Marshal Sir
Norman Bottomley to Arthur Harris, January 14, 1944,
quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p.
265.

"The C-in-C (i.e. Harris)
states that there can be little doubt that the enemy would be caused to
capitulate by the destruction of between 40 and 50 percent of the principal
German towns, and that the Lancaster force alone should be sufficient, to
produce in Germany by 1 April 1944 a state of devastation in which surrender is
inevitable. I am of the opinion that it would be sounder for Bomber
Command to subordinate as far as may be necessary their efforts to achieve a
quick victory in favour of helping the Americans to deploy their strength so
that the Combined Bomber forces (and Overlord) may together achieve a certain
victory." -- Director of Bomber
Operations Sid Bufton, 1944, quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p.
266.

Until late 1943, the official bombing policy of the United States Army Air
Force (USAAF) in Europe was to hit German military and industrial facilities,
and not to bomb entire urban "areas". The USAAF in effect pursued a
targeted, precision bombing policy similar to that the RAF had employed from September 1939
until February 1942. To the Americans it was critical that air power be
used to knock out Germany's capacity to make war. This meant employing
aerial bombardment against what USAAF officers referred to as "key nodes" of
production, or "bottlenecks" in vital German war industries and transportation
lines. It was firmly believed among top American officers like Carl Spaatz,
Ira Eaker,
and Henry ("Hap") Arnold, that destroying segments of German industry would
considerably shorten the war.

Pursuing a "tactical" or "precision" bombing doctrine was based on several
things, above and beyond the basic belief that bombing urban centers was
ineffective. First, American commanders believed in the superior training
of their pilots, some of whom had spent their entire career in the Army Air
Force perfecting precision bombing techniques. Second, the USAAF also
employed the Norden Bombsight, which was far better than anything the British
possessed. Confidence in the Norden gave the Americans faith in their
ability to deliver pinpoint accuracy during bombing raids. Third, American
officers believed that their planes, the B-17 and later the B-24 Super Fortress,
were heavily armored enough and heavily armed enough to both with stand German
fighter attacks and to shoot those fighters out of the sky. Fourth, the
Americans argued that their flying tactics were superior to those employed by
the RAF. By flying in a "box" formation, heavily armed American bomber
formations were thought to be "self-defending". German fighters would be
forced to fly through interlocking fields of fire, which would minimize the
number of American planes shot down. American planes also had an effective
operating ceiling of 33,000 feet, which was too high for German fighters to
operate and out of anti-aircraft fire range.

Therefore, using superior tactics, training, and weaponry, American
commanders were confident that the USAAF could launch efficient daylight attacks
against German rail depots and roads, oil refineries, military installations,
and factory complexes. They wholeheartedly believed that unlike the
British, American air power would not have to resort to the large-scale
night-time area bombing of urban centers.

American Opinions and Criticism of Area Bombing

Until the end of 1943, most officers in the USAAF did not accept area bombing as
a viable alternative to precision bombing. American doubts were based on
the belief that area bombing was a costly waste of effort and munitions that in
the end achieved none of its intended goals. Early in the war, at least,
American officers were also very wary of the ethical problems that resulted from
indiscriminately bombing civilians. This would change by 1944. The
following quotes reflect American attitudes toward and criticism of area bombing
as it was practiced by the RAF.

"The effectiveness of aviation
to break the will of a well-organized nation is claimed by some; but this has
never been demonstrated and is not accepted by members of the armed services of
our nation." -- "'Doctrines of the Army Air Corps' with covering note from
the War Plans Division of the War Department General Staff, December 21, 1934
cited in Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality, p. 128.

"Another vital lesson - one that has taken even air specialists by surprise -
relates to the behaviour of civilian populations under air punishment. It
had generally been assumed that aerial bombardment would quickly shatter popular
morale, causing deep civilian reactions. ... The progress of this war has tended
to indicate that this expectation was unfounded. ... These facts are significant
beyond their psychological interest. They mean that haphazard
destruction of cities - sheer blows at morale - are costly and wasteful in
relation to the tactical results achieved. Attacks will increasingly
be concentrated on military rather than on random human targets.
Unplanned vandalism from the air must give way, more and more, to planned,
predetermined destruction. More than ever the principal objectives will be
critical aggregates of electric power, aviation industries, dock facilities,
essential public utilities and the like." -- Major Alexander Seversky, US
Army Air Force, Victory Through Air Power (NY, 1942).

The Casablanca Compromise

The American policy of precision bombing caused conflicts with the British, who
considered it a waste of airmen's lives, resources, and time. However,
despite sometimes heated disagreement between American and British bomber
commands, both sides did their best to present a unified front in support of the
war effort. In particular, American generals Carl Spaatz and Henry "Hap"
Arnold made every effort to cooperate with their British counterparts,
regardless of their doctrinal differences.

This determination to present a united front on the subject of bombing was evident in a
compromise statement
released after the Casablanca Conference in early 1943. In his book
Bomber Command, Max Hastings explains that because Churchill was able to get
the invasion of Europe postponed until 1944, he felt obliged to drop his
complaints about the American practice of precision bombing, which he believed
diluted the effectiveness of the Allied bombing campaign against Germany.[3]

Bombing remained the only offensive weapon by which to carry the fight to the
Germans. Therefore, from January 1943 onward, the RAF and the USAAF would
carry out a "Combined Bomber Offensive" (CBO) combining American daylight
precision bombing with British night-time area bombing. The statement
released at Casablanca affirmed that "the primary object [of the CBO] will
be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military,
industrial, and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German
people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally
weakened."[4]

In the weeks after the Casablanca Conference, General Ira Eaker, commander of
the USAAF Eighth Air Force set out to turn this general statement into concrete
bombing policy. Eaker's plan for winning the war using precision
bombing required that the bombing force available to him be built up to 2,702
aircraft by April of 1944. Were this done, Eaker promised to reduce German
sub construction by 89%, fighter construction by 43%, bomber construction by
65%, ball-bearing production by 76%, and synthetic rubber production by 50%[5]

The American doctrine of precision bombing thus would be intact throughout
1943 and 1944, while the British simultaneously would pursue their area bombing
campaign.

Into the late summer and fall of 1943, American confidence in the ultimate
effectiveness of precision bombing was as strong as ever. Unfortunately,
however, American belief in the viability of precision bombing was deeply shaken
after the two costly raids on the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt.
After the second Schweinfurt Raid in October 1943 the USAAF joined the RAF
in the area bombing of German cities. Precision bombing raids on key
sectors of German industry would continue, but these would now be carried out
simultaneously with area bombing raids. This change of
direction drained considerable resources from the precision bombing campaign,
which was unfortunate given evidence that suggests continued attacks on vital industries, particularly oil and ball-bearing
production, could have ended the war in 1943 or 1944.

The First Schweinfurt Raid

Of all Germany's war-critical industries, ball-bearing production was the
most centralized, and also one of the most critical to the German war effort.
Without an adequate supply of ball-bearings significant portions of German
armaments production would grind to a halt. Allied intelligence had
determined that the factories at Schweinfurt produced roughly half of all the
ball-bearings used by the German army. The first raid on Schweinfurt took
place on August 17, 1943. During the raid 60 bombers were shot down out of
376 of the bombers sent on the mission.
Losses on this scale shocked the Americans, but the results had been extremely
promising as damage to the factories had reduced ball-bearing production by 38%.[6]

The Second Schweinfurt Raid

Although the Americans had been stunned by their losses in the first raid on
Schweinfurt, the results had demonstrated that the damage to German war capacity
was too consider able to ignore. A second raid therefore took place on
October 14, 1943. This time the production of ball-bearings at Schweinfurt
fell by 67% due to damage caused by the American bombing. However, of the
291 planes sent to Germany 60 were shot down and another 17 were severely
damaged.[7] These losses
were too much for the Eighth Air Force to tolerate and the Americans concluded
that without long-range fighter defense, Allied bombers could not operate during
the day because of German fighters.

Adding insult to injury was the fact that Arthur Harris contributed directly
to the "defeat" of American precision bombing doctrine at Schweinfurt.
Harris had been ordered to support the American daylight attacks with night-time
raids by the RAF. Schweinfurt certainly would have been easy to locate due
to the fires caused by the earlier American bombing, These raids could
have effectively wiped out remaining ball-bearing production at the Schweinfurt
complex. Instead, Harris, who detested precision bombing, refused to send
his bombers to Schweinfurt, which allowed the Germans to recover and disperse
ball-bearing production. RAF bombers would not attack Schweinfurt until
February 1944, by which time they were far too late to have any effect.[8]

The Aftermath

Within weeks after the Schweinfurt raid, opinion within the
Eighth Air Force had shifted in favor of adding nighttime area bombing to the
American air offensive.
General Ira Eaker, until this point a stout defender of the policy of targeted
bombing wrote to Hap Arnold "I am concerned that you will not appreciate the
tremendous damage that is being done to the German morale by these attacks
through the overcast, since we cannot show you appreciable damage by
photographs. … The German people cannot take that kind of terror much longer."[9]

Other changes soon followed. Individual planes were no
longer allowed to drop their bombs upon sighting the target. Now, all of
the bombers in a formation would drop simultaneously following the signal of a
lead plane. This was not precision bombing any longer, it was pattern
bombing of a large area. Bombardiers were also allowed to drop their bombs
through overcast skies and no specific sighting of the target was necessary.
American officers would participate fully in the British campaign against German
cities, a campaign that many of them had dismissed only months earlier.

After the war, the German Minister for Armaments Production, Albert Speer,
professed shock that "vast but pointless area bombing" was being continued in
favor of highly effective precision bombing.[10]
According to Speer, the failure to continue regularly attacking Schweinfurt
allowed the Reich to escape a "further catastrophic blow" because "armaments
production would have been crucially weakened after two months and after four
months would have been brought completely to a standstill."[11]
"What really saved us," Speer continued, "was the fact that from this time on
the enemy to our astonishment once again ceased his attacks on the ball-bearing
industry."

On April 14, 1944, after a long battle, the combined bomber forces of the
USAAF Eighth Air Force and RAF Bomber Command were finally subordinated to
General Dwight Eisenhower in preparation for the D-Day landings in Normandy,
France. Bomber Command C-in-C Arthur Harris, and others within the British
bombing establishment had energetically resisted any attempt to subordinate
their offensive area bombing campaign to tactical necessities. However, by
spring of 1944 Harris' continued claims that he could end the war via area
bombing had not panned out. In fact, as Max Hastings notes, the five-month
campaign to bomb Germany into capitulation by repeatedly striking Berlin, had
been a complete failure.[12]

Between April 1944 and July 1944, the tactical bombing of German
transportation lines, air bases, and military installations was stepped up in
preparation for the invasion of Europe. However, certain war-critical
industries, like oil, also were the target of Allied (especially American) air
assault.

Carl Spaatz' "Oil Plan"

The potential of the precision bombing of German industry to be a war winning
weapon was again illustrated in spring 1944 when General Carl Spaatz was finally
allowed to undertake his "Oil Plan" against Germany's synthetic oil production
facilities; this after fighting a lengthy battle against Arthur Harris and other
area bombing advocates simply to get permission to try out his plan. On
May 12, 1944, and again on May 28th and 29th, Spaatz' bomber formations hit
synthetic oil plants in central and eastern Germany. As a result of these
attacks, "petroleum available to Germany fell from 927,000 tons in March, to
715,000 tons in May, and 472,000 tons in June. The Luftwaffe's supplies of
aviation spirit fell from 180,000 tons in April, to 50,000 tons in June, and
10,000 tons in August. ... By the late summer of 1944 the Luftwaffe lacked the
fuel to fly anything like its available order of battle."[13]
In Albert Speer's estimation these attacks spelled "the end of German armaments
production ... the chemical plants had proved to be extremely sensitive to
bombing." More importantly for precision bombing advocates, during the
second attack at the end of May "a mere four hundred bombers of the American
Eighth Air Force delivered a greater blow than twice that number in the first
attack."[14]

THE RENEWAL OF MASSIVE AREA BOMBING TOWARDS THE END OF THE
WAR

Despite the success of the Oil Plan, due to limitations in intelligence
Spaatz could not effectively prove to his superiors that the precision bombing
of Germany's synthetic oil industry was having a dramatic impact. Allied
commanders therefore continued to demand that bombers be used primarily to
support the advance of ground forces. Furthermore, by late summer, German
forces were falling back toward the Rhine River and it appeared that the war
would be over in a very short time. Ironically, the success being
experienced by the Allies created the conditions for a renewed area bombing
offensive against Germany. German air defenses and radar in France and the
Low Countries had been occupied or destroyed following the successful invasion.
Allied airfields were also now well advanced toward the German border. It
was now possible for bomber formations to strike deep into Germany with fighter
support and without having to fly through hundreds of kilometers of German air
defenses.

It was within this context of "impending" German defeat that the advocates of
area bombing among the British Chiefs of Staff began agitating for renewing the
assault on German civilian morale, in order to bring about a complete collapse
of the Reich: "The time might well come in the not so distant future when an
all-out attack by every means at our disposal on German civilian morale might be
decisive. ... The method by which such an attack would be carried out should be
examined and all possible preparations made."[15] This memo, which was produced in July 1944, set the stage for the now infamous
air raid on Dresden. For his part, Bomber Command
chief Arthur Harris was delighted with the change of policy. Churchill
too, supported reverting to area bombing, writing to Harris, "I am all for
cracking in now on to Germany all that can be spared from the battlefields."[16] Concerning the renewal of area bombing, the
Directorate of Bomber Operations focused specifically on creating civilian casualties,
which was an extremely candid reversal of the earlier focus on destroying
structures and housing: "If we assume that the daytime population of the area
attacked is 300,000, we may expect 220,000 casualties. 50 per cent of
these or 110,000 may expect to be killed. It is suggested that such an
attack resulting in so many deaths, the great proportion of which will be key
personnel, cannot help but have a shattering effect on political and civilian
morale all over Germany."[17]

By August 1944, Harris and Bomber Command received permission to resume area
bombing attacks on twelve German cities, when his planes were not needed
elsewhere. With this the area bombing assault on Germany began anew and in
the last quarter of 1944 alone, Bomber Command would drop more bombs on German
cities than in all of 1943. "Precision" assaults on German industry would
not be stopped, but they would take a backseat to undirected area bombing.[18]
Harris had his way and area bombing continued apace. Nevertheless, Harris
would continue to protest any use of British bombers for purely tactical or
"precision" raids on industry. He remained focused simply on killing as
many German cities as was possible:

"... In the past eighteen
months, Bomber Command has virtually destroyed forty-five out of the leading
sixty German cities. In spite of invasion diversions (i.e. D-Day) we have
so far managed to keep up and even to exceed our average of two and a half
cities devastated a month. ... There are not many industrial centres of
population now left intact. Are we going to abandon this vast task, which
the Germans themselves have long admitted to be their worst headache, just as it
nears completion?" -- Sir Arthur
Harris to Air Staff Chief Sir Charles Portal, November 1, 1944 quoted in Max
Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 331.

"You refer to a plan for
the destruction of the sixty leading German cities, and to your efforts to keep
up with, and even to exceed, your average of two and a half such cities
devastated each month; I know that you
have long felt such a plan to be the most effective way of bringing about the
collapse of Germany. Knowing this, I have, I must confess, at times
wondered whether the magnetism of the remaining German cities has not in the
past tended as much to deflect our bombers from their primary objectives as the
tactical and weather difficulties which you described so fully in your letter of
1 November. I would like you to reassure me that this is not so. If
I knew you to be as wholehearted in the attack on oil as in the past you have
been in the matter of attacking cities, I would have little to worry about." --
Air Staff Chief Sir Charles Portal to Sir Arthur Harris, November 12, 1944,
quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 331.

The following memorandum quote from Winston Churchill reveals his full
knowledge of the mass death and destruction wrought upon German cities by Allied
bombing. It also represents Churchill's attempt to distance himself from
the questionable ethical dimensions of the bombing campaign, despite Churchill's
unwavering support for, indeed, demand for the area bombing of Germany.
The sentences in bold print were removed from the final version of the memo.

"It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of
German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under
other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into
control of an utterly ruined land. ... The destruction of Dresden remains a
serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. ... I feel the need
for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and
communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of
terror and wanton destruction, however impressive." -- Prime Minister
Winston Churchill Memo to the Chiefs of Staff Committee and the Chief of Air
Staff, March 28, 1945, Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 344.

"There is no indiscriminate bombing. ... the bombing is of those targets
which are most effective from the military point of view." -- Clement Atlee,
Deputy Prime Minister, quoted in
Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 171.

"The objectives of our bomber offensive in
Germany are to destroy the capacity of Germany to make war and to relieve the
pressure of the German air force and armies on our Russian allies.
No instruction has been given to destroy dwelling houses rather
than armament factories, but it is
impossible to distinguish in night-bombing between factories and the dwellings
that surround them." -- Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State, Statement in
the House of Commons, December 1, 1943, quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command
(NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 172.

"I can give the assurance
that we are not bombing the women and children of Germany wantonly."
-- Harold Balfour, March 1, 1943, quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command
(NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 173.

"[Allied
Air Chiefs are pursuing the] deliberate terror-bombing of German population
centres as a ruthless expedient of hastening Hitler's downfall."
-- Statement by unidentified RAF officer during a press briefing following the
bombing of Dresden. This statement appeared in U.S. newspapers, but was
censored by the British government and therefore did not appear in print in the
UK.

Historian Richard Overy compiled a listing of the tons of bombs dropped over
Europe (inc. Germany and occupied territories) by the RAF and USAAF during the
Second World War. This tonnage was dropped predominantly on cities in area
bombing raids, not in tactical attacks on infrastructure or war materiel
industries. Even as late as 1945, with Germany reeling and fighting almost
completely within her own borders, the bombing of German cities proceeded apace.
Had the war continued until 1946, the Allies were on track toward dropping a
projected total of roughly 1,432,000 tons of bombs.

The quotes below are from a short defense of Great Britain's area bombing
policy written by J.M. Spaight, an official in the Air Ministry at the time, and
a man well placed to understand the rationale behind the decision to bomb German
cities.

"Civilisation, I believe firmly, would have been
destroyed if there had been no bombing in this war. It was the bomber aircraft
which, more than any other instrument of war, prevented the forces of evil from
prevailing. It was supposed to be the chosen instrument of aggression. Actually,
it was precisely the opposite. Aggression would have had a clearer run if there
had been no bombers—on either side. And the greatest contribution of the bomber
both to the winning of the war and the cause of peace is still to come." -- J.M.
Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London, 1944), p. 7.

"The tremendous difference which air warfare
makes is that the long process of attrition can be carried on without any
comparable waste of human life." -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated
(London, 1944), p. 10.

"What can be claimed without fear of
contradiction is that air power is an absolutely essential factor in the
combination which will give us victory; and at the very heart of air power there
stands the strategic offensive. The matter was placed in the proper perspective
by Mr. Churchill in his great speech at Ottawa on 30 December, 1941. 'While an
ever-increasing bombing offensive against Germany will remain one of the
principal methods of ending this war,' he said, 'it is not the only one which
growing strength enables us to take into account'." -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing
Vindicated (London, 1944), p. 22.

"Leading articles in
the Press reflect the informed re-action to it. 'We are thoroughly committed to
the large-scale bombing of Germany as part of our war-winning strategy,' said
the Daily Mail on 18 September, 1942, 'and there can be no question that
so far the policy is paying good dividends by weakening the enemy's productive
power and dislocating his daily life. It is doubtful whether this use of the air
weapon by itself could win the war, but it is certain that we could not win
without it'." -- -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London, 1944), pp.
22-23.

"In a speech in the Reichstag on 26 April, 1942,
Hitler said: 'Should the idea of bombing civilians increase in Great Britain, I
wish to say this before the whole world: "Churchill started the air war in 1940,
and then started moaning. From now on I shall return blow for blow, till I have
broken this criminal and his works."'

Here I interrupt the Hitlerian flow of words to
quote some which Mr. Churchill used in his speech at the County Hall, London, on
14 July, 1941, that is, nine months previously. 'We ask no favour of the enemy.
We seek from them no compunction. On the contrary, if tonight the people of
London were asked to cast their votes whether a convention should be entered
into to stop the bombing of all cities, the overwhelming majority would cry "No,
we will mete out to the Germans the measure, and more than the measure, that
they have meted out to us".' This statement was greeted with cheers. There is
not much moaning about it." -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London,
1944), p. 45.

"We in Britain had organised a Bomber Command.
The whole raison d'être of that Command was to bomb Germany if she should
be our enemy. We were not bombing her. We were most carefully abstaining from
bombing her. What, then, was the use of Bomber Command? Its position was almost
a ridiculous one. It seemed to be keeping clear of the war, keeping neutral,
acting as if it had made a separate peace. Had it—horrible thought—been bitten
by a bug from Eire? What was the explanation? It certainly looked as if the
policy of Munich, of appeasement, were still being continued in this particular
sphere of warlike activity, or inactivity. Hitler must have been a happy man,
happier far than he is now, during that first winter. In effect he had won a
great psychological victory, or he seemed to have won it; perhaps here, again,
fate smiled on him only to betray." -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated
(London, 1944), p. 60.

"... Our failure to
carry the war into Germany was the subject of a good deal of criticism in this
country. Why were we dropping leaflets and not bombs? it was asked. The
Germans would have been more impressed by high explosives than even the best
propagandist literature. It was a policy of 'kid gloves and confetti', said an
important monthly journal.' Sometimes the reaction was bewilderment tinged with
sardonic amusement. 'Lord, man, you might have hurt someone!' a squadron leader
was supposed to have admonished a flying officer who had not untied the packet
of 'nickels' (leaflets) before jettisoning them. Another jest was that the Navy
had taken to sending down leaflets instead of depth-charges in its hunt for
submarines. ... These comments were the froth on the surface of waters of doubt
and perplexity which were deep and wide. There was serious criticism of our
inaction. The Air Force, it was complained, was not being used for the
purpose for which, so far as it was an offensive force, it had been created.
Only when the German advance into the Low Countries and France began in May,
1940, was our striking force of the air allowed to fulfill its function." --
J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London, 1944), p. 61.

"... On 27 January, 1940, another newspaper, the
Daily Mail, endorsed editorially the view put forward by its
contemporary. It devoted a leading article to combating the suggestion of Mr.
Amery and others that we should start the bombing of Germany. We were fighting,
the article said, for a moral issue and we should do nothing unworthy of our
cause. It confused the issue by speaking of a choice between the deliberate
bombing of women and children and not bombing at all. Actually, the choice was
between bombing military objectives in Germany and not bombing them: a totally
different matter." -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London, 1944), p.
64.

"The change made in May
was heralded by a statement issued by the Foreign Office on the 10th of that
month. It began by referring to the assurance given to the President of the
United States that the Air Force had received orders limiting bombing to
strictly military objectives and went on to state that His Majesty's
Government 'now publicly proclaim that they reserve to themselves the right to
take any action which they consider, appropriate in the event of bombing by the
enemy of civil populations, whether in the United Kingdom, France or in
countries assisted by the United Kingdom'." -- -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing
Vindicated (London, 1944), pp. 67-68.

"... We chose the
better, because the harder, way. We refused to purchase immunity—immunity for a
time at least—for our cities while those of our friends went up in flames. We
offered London as a sacrifice in the cause of freedom and civilisation.
Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany. There was no
certainty, but there was a reasonable probability, that our capital and our
industrial centres would not have been attacked if we had continued to refrain
from attacking those of Germany. No doubt some readers will say that I am making
too big an assumption here and that Germany would have raided London and our
provincial towns in any event. Perhaps so; I can only put on record my own
belief that she probably would not have done so, partly because it would not
have suited her military book, partly because she was afraid of the long-term
consequences. She would have called a truce if she could from the cross-raiding
by British and German bombers when it did begin; she did call one, in effect,
whenever she saw a ghost of a chance. It simply did not pay her, this kind of
air warfare. Humanitarian considerations had nothing whatever to do with the
matter.

Yet,
because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist
distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic offensive, we
have shrunk from giving our great decision of May, 1940, the publicity which it
deserved. That, surely, was a mistake. It was a splendid decision. It was as
heroic, as self-sacrificing, as Russia's decision, to adopt her policy of
'scorched earth'. It gave Coventry and Birmingham, Sheffield and
Southampton, the right to look Kief and Kharkov, Stalingrad and Sebastopol, in
the face. Our Soviet allies would have been less critical of our inactivity in
1942 if they had understood what we had done. We should have shouted it from the
house-tops instead of keeping silence about it.

It could have harmed
us morally only if it were equivalent to an admission that we were the first to
bomb towns. It was nothing of the sort." -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing
Vindicated (London, 1944), pp. 73-74.

"But over and above
these contacts of armies and fleets there are others which man's new power to
use the air for his warlike ventures has made inevitable. It has been a
consequence—the logical consequence—of that new power that areas which had
hitherto been immune from the ravages of war should no longer be left in the
enjoyment of their ancient peace." -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated
(London, 1944), pp. 76-77.

"Today machinery
dominates war. Man is a pigmy beside the robots of scientific destruction which
he has created ... And it is these monstrosities, these half human half-devilish
monstrosities, which get themselves born, somehow, in the battle-towns. That
is the grim fact which makes those towns fit brand for the burning.

The killer-machines
are made necessarily in crowded centres. They could not otherwise be made in the
quantities which modern warfare demands. The Moloch consumes armaments with an
appetite which only mass-production can satisfy. An enormous and sustained
output of munitions is needed if the armed forces, of sizes unknown in the past,
are to be kept supplied with the matériel which they use. Mass-production
implies, in turn, the presence of great numbers of workers, male and female, in
the neighbourhood of the plants. Naturally, especially in a prolonged war, the
workers' families tend to congregate in the same areas. The great urban
agglomerations are in fact the areas in which the armament factories that really
mater are located." -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London,
1944), pp. 77-78.

" ... On 19 May, 1943,
Mr. Churchill, in his speech before the United States Congress, underlined the
warning which he had then addressed to the German people. 'It is the settled
policy of our two staff's and war-making authorities,' he said, 'to make it
impossible for Germany to carry on any form of war industry on a large or
concentrated scale, either in Germany, Italy or in the enemy-occupied countries.
Wherever these centres exist or are developed they will be destroyed, and the
munitions population will be dispersed.' The message conveyed to the German
munition workers in the two speeches, read together and colloquially
paraphrased, amounted to this: 'Get out while the going is good. If you don't,
we'll bomb you out'." -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London, 1944),
pp. 95-96.

"The military results of the so-called
high-level, precision bombing were not commensurate with the wastage of
personnel and matériel involved for the attacking formations. To
redress the balance it, was necessary to bring. into use projectiles of such
destructive capacity that when launched from great heights on the estimated
target area they could be counted upon to wreck the target as well as
(unfortunately) much else besides. The justification of the method must rest on
military necessity. If in no other way can a belligerent destroy his enemy's
armament centres or interrupt his enemy's process of munitionment, then this way
can be defended. So justified, it is not inconsistent with accepted principles
of the laws of war." -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London,
1944), p. 98.

"To speak of the
'bombing of civilians' without qualification is really to confuse the issue. One
must define one's terms. The old clear distinction between soldiers and
civilians has been obscured. That is not to say that the whole population of an
enemy country is subject to attack. Indiscriminate bombing is certainly not
justifiable. The point to be remembered is that there is a difference between
the civilians who are engaged in definitely warlike activities and those who are
not. It is the latter who have a claim to immunity, not the former. The people
who make and transport war material are, to the opposing belligerent, active,
dangerous enemies. He is as fully entitled to try to put them out of action as
if they were commissioned or enlisted soldiers. They are in fact warriors.
The fact that they wear no uniform is immaterial. They are in no proper
sense of the word non-combatants.

The change which the
coming of flight has brought about is that these people, these warriors, can now
be attacked even though an army stands between them and the invader. Another
change has come to pass also. Today the weapons of war are made by millions
of workers, men and women, in thousands of factories. Total war cannot be waged
unless there are huge agglomerations of warriors on the home front." -- J.M.
Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London, 1944), p. 112.

"There would in fact
be no case against bombing if as great a degree of precision were possible as
was thought at one time to be practicable. Conditions have changed even
since Mr. Chamberlain explained in the House of Commons on 21 June, 1938, the
view of the Government of the permissible limits of air attack. Deliberate
attack on the civilian population was unlawful, but military targets might be
bombed if they could be identified and if reasonable care were taken not to bomb
civilians in their neighbourhood. It has become impossible to comply with
these conditions to the full. Targets are no longer identifiable because
belligerents have taken good care that they should not be identifiable. They
have not only adopted the most elaborate schemes of camouflage but ... have
protected all centres of war-production with very powerful defences. It would be
suicide, normally, for a bomber formation to approach its target at a height at
which precision of aim would be certain." -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing
Vindicated (London, 1944), pp. 115-116.

"... It is war—the new kind of war. It
is wrong, horrible, unendurable, but it was inevitable. It was inevitable that
the air offensive against an enemy's sources of armed strength should come and
with it the incidental killing of non-combatants. It was hardly less inevitable
that an enemy to whom such an offensive was anathema should reply by
indiscriminate attack on his opponent's towns. It is an evil thing that has
grown out of another evil thing. The initial evil was the intermingling of
two incompatibles. The intrusion began when the ways of war were superimposed
upon the ways of peace. The bomber crews only followed where the armament
producers had led the way." -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London,
1944), p. 146.

"The killing or maiming of non-combatants in
such circumstances is a lamentable incident of war. So is the destruction caused
in the purely terroristic raids—including 'Baedeker' raids—to which the enemy
may resort in retaliation. The loss of precious lives in such raids is to be
regarded, as is the loss of the no less precious lives of our airmen over
Germany, as the human price that has to be paid for the winning of a military
advantage of the first order. The advantage is the weakening of the enemy's war
potential and the ultimate saving of thousands of lives in our own and our
Allies' forces." -- J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London, 1944), p.
148.

"The bomber has rehabilitated itself. It was to
have been the destroyer of civilisation. Actually, it has been the saver of
civilisation. But for it we in Britain would hardly have survived in this war,
and most certainly our and America's task in defeating Germany and Japan would
have been immensely more difficult. Bombing has served us well. To say that
is not to make a fetish of it. Bombing is a horrible thing, at best. The bomb is
much more the diabolus than the deus ex machinâ. It is a murderous
weapon. Its only merit is that it can murder war. The bomber is the only weapon
that can do that efficiently. Massed artillery could do it but only in great and
bloody battles—which are the war we want to prevent. War cannot live with the
bomber. It can smother and stifle war at source." -- J.M. Spaight,
Bombing Vindicated (London, 1944), p. 152.

The majority of these web sites are in German. Scholarship about and
discussion of the criminal dimensions of the Allied bombing campaign remains
practically non-existent in the English-speaking world.

A great deal has been written about the ethical implications of dropping of
the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The reality, is, however, that
by the time these bombs were dropped, massive formations of American bombers had
already been routinely leveling entire Japanese cities through the combined use
of high explosive and incendiary bombs. This tactic of creating a
firestorm was used against Tokyo on February 23-24, 1945 when, after hours of
incessant bombing, the interior of the city exploded into a self-fueling
firestorm. According to reports, the flames that roared through the city
became so hot that metal melted. As many as 100,000 people were killed
during this raid alone, a death toll that surpasses the number killed in either
Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The fact is that the targeting of civilians, with
the intent of killing as many as possible in order to break morale and bring an
end to the war, was already well within the capacity of the U.S. Army Air Force
before the advent of atomic weapons.

12. Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 268. Hastings
also notes that in the weeks leading up to and after the decision to place
Bomber Command under Eisenhower, British area bombing fell off considerably: "In
March 1944, 70 per cent of British bombs were directed against Germany. In
April this proportion fell to well under half; in May to less than a quarter; in
June to negligible proportions." (pp. 276-77)

18. Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 330 notes that
between July and September 1944 only 11 per cent of Bomber Command's sorties
were directed at oil installations, with 20 per cent directed at cities.
Between October and December the numbers were 14 per cent directed at oil and 58
per cent directed at cities.